Apple reportedly cancels AR glasses development
According to a new report from the always-in-the-know regarding Apple products Mark Gurman, Apple has canceled development of a pair of AR glasses. These would have paired to Macs, and not worked standalone like the Vision Pro headset.
The company allegedly shuttered the project this week. The device would have looked like normal glasses but with built-in projectors that would display information, images, and video in the field of view for each eye.
Interestingly, Apple worked on including lenses that changed their tint depending on what the user is doing, basically like a status setting in a chat app. The project was apparently seen as a way forward for Apple following the Vision Pro's lackluster sales performance.
These glasses were supposed to be something that, in contrast to the Vision Pro, "everyday users could embrace". And yet, finding the right tech to put into them, and "at the right cost", has simply proven too complicated so the company decided to just give up.
Thus, Meta can breathe easily knowing Apple won't be competing with its smart glasses anytime soon. Meta currently has the Ray-Ban collaboration smart glasses, of which it's sold more than one million units already, and it's working on an AR version due to launch in 2027. That's also when Apple would have launched its now-canceled glasses, so it would have been a very interesting year for consumer-facing AR gear. Well, it still could be, but without Apple's presence in the space.
Apple initially wanted its glasses to be able to pair with an iPhone, but that couldn't provide them with enough processing power, and the pairing also drained the iPhone's battery quite fast. That's when the shift to pairing with a Mac happened. However, the Mac-connected product "performed poorly during reviews with executives, and the desired features continued to change", the report claims.